Category: USA Techology Trends

This week I had been invited hold a keynote speech about the revolution Bitcoin started in the financial world. The topic of my speech was:

The End of Money as we know it:
How Cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Digital Money disrupt our financial system?

Bitcoin is to money, as the internet was to information.
Smart entrepreneurs and early stage investors have recognized the tremendous power the concept of digital currency, especially Bitcoin, has brought to light. Hundreds of StartUps like Xapo, Circle, BitStamp are developing a new industry with the monetary support of some of the most acclaimed venture investors worldwide.

The trend of Cryptocurrencies is raising many new questions. How will the future of money look like? Will we have one global currency? Will bitcoin be the end of paper money? Who will be the key players in the digital currency industry?

Last week we hosted another DIGITAL LEADERS event, this time in San Francisco. Although I knew what the speakers will talk about, I was totally overwhelmed by the quality of their keynotes, their thought provoking ideas and their innovative projects. But even more exciting have been the discussions after each talk on the tables. Have a look:

At DIGITAL LEADERS San Francisco we focused on three main topics: Digital Transformation, Accelerating Innovation and Global Challenges. This had been our speakers:

Facts: Facebook currently has more than a billion users with more than a trillion connections. And there are more than 240 billion fotos published on facebook.

Graph Search is a new way for you to find people, photos, places and interests that are most relevant to you on Facebook. Technically it is a high-speed contextual discovery engine.

Graph Search will help you instantly find others, learn more about them and make connections, explore photos, quickly find places like local attractions and restaurants, and learn about common interests like music, movies, books and more. All results are unique based on the strength of relationships and connections.

“It is not web search,” Zuckerberg says.

Graph Search and web search are completely different. Web search is designed to take a set of keywords (for example: “music industry”) and provide the best possible results that match those keywords.
With Graph Search you combine phrases (for example: “my friends in Los Angeles who like Justin Timberlake”) to get that set of people, places, photos or other content that’s been shared on Facebook.

Facebook is taking privacy more serious
Another big difference of Facebook Graph Search is that every piece of content on Facebook has its own audience, and most content isn’t public. Facebook built Graph Search from the start with privacy in mind, and it respects the privacy and audience of each piece of content on Facebook. It makes finding new things much easier, but you can only see what you could already view elsewhere on Facebook.

In the late nineties the recruiting industry had been turned upside down by the start of many online job-posting websites, including the launch of Monster.com. Over a decade later the online recruiting industry seems to reach a dead end. The former giant and market leader Monster Inc. is tumbling and the CEO Sal Iannuzzi does not give confidence to have a turnaround strategy in place. He even declared publicly to sell the whole or parts of the company in March this year (Source: Reuters).
In yesterdays investor call the company announced that the 2nd-Quarter profits have decreased 56%. The market cap has dropped below $800 million, I can still remember when Monster’s market cap was over $3 billion last year.

Such a change is always an opportunity, too. While the quarterly revenues of Monster Worldwide fell to $237 million, LinkedIn’s revenues are steadily growing and have reached $230 million at the same quarter.

From an outside perspective it looks sad to see that Monster Inc. is not able to reinvent itself and look forward rather than trying to protect old-thinking. It’s a bit like the music industry when peer2peer sharing, napster and later iTunes came along. They have time, money and smart people to change and lead into a successful future. But my feeling is that Sal Iannuzzi is lacking of a powerful vision and dynamic leadership. Two things which is needed to turn such a big “ship” around.

I don’t know who will be the future leader of online recruiting, but LinkedIn seems to be running the right path, as they are heavily investing in its product and technology. Furthermore LinkedIn has acquired Connected, Rapportive and Slideshare – all relevant building blocks to build a future proof company.

We are getting close to the launch of our new private online community.
Best of All Worlds in the coming weeks. I wanted to make sure you received your invitation.

As you may know, Louise and I founded aSmallWorld in early 2004, a pioneer in online communities. After we left the company several years ago, we began designing and building a new, useful and relevant social network – an alternative to what currently dominates social media.

Best of All Worlds will enable us to navigate and leverage the collective intelligence of the trusted and relevant few, rather than the wisdom of the crowd. It will be a fun and useful tool for our social and professional lives by providing trusted information among top influencers and connectors worldwide – in an intimate and private online environment.

I met Arianna at the Monaco Media Forum, where she briefly introduced me to the idea of a Women Network. A few month later she announced the first Event of the WIE Network. I am looking forward to attend the inaugural symposium in New York in a few weeks.

The WIE Symposium (Women: Inspiration & Enterprise) is the annual conference of the WIE Network hosted by Sarah Brown, Arianna Huffington and Donna Karan. The WIE Network is a forum for professional women to network and connect.

Sarah Brown, Wife of former UK Prime Minister, is the Chairwoman of The WIE Symposium which will be held on September 21st, 2010, in New York City. Drawing on the legendary drive and energy of New York City, the Symposium is a motivating and results driven gathering of creative women, working together to achieve social change and inspire the next generation of women leaders and advocates.

The symposium takes place at the newly renovated “Skylight West” located steps from Midtown, the Javits Center, Chelsea Galleries, and the Highline. It also features the city’s largest open rooftop, offering a gorgeous view over the skyline of the city and sunset of the Hudson River.

Facebook has quietly become the biggest relationship-marketing provider for many brands.

For many marketers, their Facebook fan bases have become their largest web presence, outstripping brand sites or e-mail programs either because a brand’s traditional web-based “owned media” is atrophying or because more consumers are migrating to social media.

Coca-Cola, with its 10.7 million Facebook fans, has three to four times the Facebook fan base as MyTown and Foursquare have registered users. (There are at least 11 brands whose Facebook fan pages have quietly grown bigger than the biggest geo-location providers.) That certainly trumps U.S. unique visitors to Coke’s brand website, which fell by more than 40% to 242,000 in July compared to a year ago, per Compete.

Kraft Foods’ Oreo is the No. 3 brand page on Facebook as tracked by DBM/Scan, with an 8.7 million fan base growing at a clip of 71,000 a day. But the multi-brand site where its web presence has been hosted, NabiscoWorld.com, has seen U.S. traffic decline from 1.2 million in July 2009 to 321,000 last month.

Ever wondered what companies Google bought during the last couple for years. There is a complete list of acquisitions by Google on Wikipedia, but I also like the following Infographic “Tracking Google’s Acquisitions”.

Today GE announced the start of a $200 million open innovation challenge that seeks breakthrough ideas to create a smarter, cleaner, more efficient electric grid, and accelerate the adoption of more efficient grid technologies. GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt unveiled the challenge, the “GE ecomagination Challenge: Powering the Grid,” here today.

The global challenge invites technologists, entrepreneurs and start-ups to share their best ideas and come together to take on one of the world’s toughest challenges – building the next-generation power grid to meet the needs of the 21st century. The challenge is one of the largest ever and is open immediately at www.ecomagination.com/challenge.

“Innovation is the engine of the global effort to transform the way we create, connect and use power,” Immelt said. “At GE we have invested broadly and deeply in digital energy solutions and see this as a substantial market for us, but we can’t do it alone. We want to work with our partners to make sure we have a comprehensive digital energy offering. This challenge is about collaboration and we are inviting others to help accelerate progress in creating a cleaner, more efficient and economically viable grid. We want to jump-start new ideas and deploy them on a scale that will modernize the electrical grid around the world.”

The Challenge, launched in collaboration with leading venture capital firms Emerald Technology Ventures, Foundation Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer and RockPort Capital, and Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief, Wired magazine, is part of GE’s ecomagination initiative, a global commitment to build innovative clean energy technologies and will help fund the most promising ideas. Proposals are sought in three, broad categories: Renewables, Grid and Eco Homes/Eco Buildings. Select Challenge entrants will be offered the opportunity to develop a commercial relationship with GE through:

Investment: the $200 million capital pledge of GE and its partners will be invested globally into promising start-ups and ideas

The $200 million commitment will help bring these new ideas to market by providing businesses and individuals with theopportunity to secure growth capital through GE investment and/or investment by participating venture capital firms. It is open to anyone aged 18 years or older and all legally formed entities.

Apple is entering the mobile advertising business and aims at high emotional and interactive ads. Here is a great example of an iAd of Toy Story. After a click on the small banner within an iPhone App you won’t leave the app directing you to a website. The user experiences a smooth change to a branded environment, the iAd. It opens like a regular app, but due to the new multitasking you can still keep the other app open.

The Toy Story iAd then shows an overview with several options and buttons. One option is to watch a few in-ad videos, play in-ad games or open the in-ad shop and buy the product right away. This might redefine mobile advertising and opens completely new ways to market products on a mobile devices.

Today Apple announced key features of the new Apple iPhone OS 4 which will come out in Summer 2010. During that presentation Steve Jobs announced that Apple is entering the mobile marketing business with iAd.

The average user spends over 30 minutes every day using apps on their phone. If we said we wanted to put an ad up every 3 minutes, that’s 10 ads per device per day. That would be 1 billion advertising opportunities per day.

Steve Jobs: “There are many free or reasonably priced apps… the developers are putting ads into apps, and we think most of this kind of advertising sucks!”. He added: “Search is not happening on phones; people are using apps. And this is where the opportunity is to deliver advertising is. You know the ads on the web — they’re eye catching and interactive, but they don’t deliver emotion. What we want to do with iAds is deliver interaction and emotion.

It’s about motion plus interactivity. The ads keep you in your app. Today when you click on a banner ad, it yanks you out of your app and throws you onto the advertisers web page. So people don’t click on the ads.

Because iAd is in the iPhone OS itself, we have figured out how to do interactive and video content without ever taking you out of the app. For developers to add this to their apps is really simple. They can do it in an afternoon. Apple is going to sell and host the ads, and we’re going to do a 60/40 split.”

60% of Advertising Revenues will be for the Developers. Apple will earn 40% of the mobile advertising market in the future.

Apple has begun sending email invitations to select members of the media inviting them to a “sneak peek of the next generation of iPhone OS software.” The invitation features a large graphic with a large “4” shadow spread across a blue background, with “Get a sneak peek into the future of iPhone OS” overlaid in white text. The event will be held on Apple’s Cupertino, CA campus and will begin at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time on April 8.